The Apple event this week revealed a slew of new hardware including beloved Macs that were overdue for refreshes and of course the new generation iPad Pro that many of us have been eagerly looking forward to. The 2018 iPad Pro is without a doubt a very powerful machine clearly aimed at professionals with demanding use cases; with performance rivaling and exceeding that of most computers all in a light, neat, and portable form factor, it really begs the question: is the iPad capable of dethroning the laptop as the ultimate mobile productivity device?

I’ve been working exclusively on my 2nd generation iPad Pro for the past couple of months, and with the excitement around the newly announced iPad Pro a number of people have been asking me why I work this way, whether it’s worth it, and how I’m able to make it work. I feel like it’s abundantly clear that Apple is intentionally blurring the boundaries of what is possible between their Macs and the iPad Pro, and they’ve clearly been successful in stirring up people’s thoughts and discussions around this.

I’d like to share my take on this, based on my experience fully embracing the iPad, and hopefully this will help you decide whether this is something you would like to explore. There are already a number of verygoodarticles that talk about the “how” of switching to an iPad based setup; I will instead focus on the “why” of switching. My experiences are also from the perspective of a software engineer working mostly on backend technologies (currently building Kubernetes on DigitalOcean), so my concerns and priorities may not be the same as yours.

I switched over to using Safari about a year ago because I was fed up with Chrome draining my battery, and I also really wanted to make use of the integration with iOS that lets me sync up browsing history and hand off what I was reading on my phone. But ever since I upgraded to High Sierra, the integrated webcam on my MacBook Pro stopped working with hangouts, and since I rely so heavily on Hangouts for work, it meant I had to start up Chrome just to use Hangouts. The way it fails also feels super trolly; the green light indicating that the webcam ss being used lights up, but there’s just no video output… This was annoying me to no end.

Yesterday, while evaluating video quality of a bunch of different webcams, I stumbled upon what seems to be a workaround that lets me use the built in FaceTime camera in Safari for hangouts.

The tl;dr is that the Google Talk plugins don’t seem to be initializing the camera correctly, but if you start up some other program that does initialize the camera correctly, it will start working in Hangouts.